Ramblings-n-Writings

Archive for September, 2008

Okay, this sign cracks me up every time I see it. Why? Look at the width of the road. Does that seriously look like it’s much bigger than one lane? That’s the normal road, not the “one lane” part where half the road is caved away. And just in case the picture might be slightly deceptive and it looks like a wide road, if two vehicles encounter each other, at least one, if not both, will have tires off the edge of the road (in the “two lane” part).

The West Virginia Department of Highways cracks me up. The DOH idea of repairing the road? Warning signs, a yield sign, and stones in the ditch so vehicles can get around the cave in. Not an unreasonable gesture on the DOH’s part, but that was two, maybe three, months ago. Where’s the regular repair? The caved in part drops off about 6-7 feet, so if a car accidently goes off the road, say when it’s icy this winter, they’ll be rolling down a nice slope right into a creek.

An important point to mention here is that West Virginia has one of the highest gas taxes in the nation (51 cents a gallon) so we can maintain our roads. (That reasoning is straight from our governor, Joe Manchin, too.) Huh? How is a sign “maintaining”? With signs like these and a plethora of dirt roads (Remember the country song line “red dirt roads”? We got miles of ‘em here.), I have to wonder. And then there’s the national report that says West Virginia supposedly has some of the best roads in the nation – maybe as long as you stay on the main highway.

That 51 cent gas tax means when my parents are paying $3.37 a gallon for gas in Pennsylvania, we’re paying a minimum of $3.88, typically more. I lived in Pennsylvania for the majority of my life. I can honestly say that I never encountered roads in such pathetic conditions as ours in W.Va. Obviously something isn’t right somewhere.

Oh, and because of that 51 cent gas tax, our state has one of the poorest economies in the nation. Do away with the gas tax, and watch our economy get a boost. Seriously, if I buy 10 gallons of gas, I pay $5.10 just in tax. If I fill my car one time a week, that’s $20.40 in tax for the month or $244.88 for the year. I can think of a hundred different things to buy for $244.88 that would help local retailers, not big oil, and certainly not our local roads.

Okay, I’m done with my soapbox now. =)

Nancy Moser is the author of three inspirational humor books and eighteen novels, including Solemnly Swear, Time Lottery, a Christy Award winner, and her latest historical, Washington’s Lady.

Nancy and her husband Mark live in the Midwest. She’s earned a degree in architecture, traveled extensively in Europe, and has performed in numerous theaters,
symphonies, and choirs. She gives Said So Sister Seminars around the country, helping women identify their gifts as they celebrate their sisterhood. She is a fan of anything antique—humans included.

Find out more at Nancy Moser.com and Sister Circles.com

ABOUT THE BOOK

Five people looking for a reason to keep living are about to find it in the last place they expect… In my usual “big cast” style comes a story of what happens when one man puts his faith on the line and holds up a John 3:16 sign at a sporting event. Roman Paulson’s life revolves around his son, Billy, a University of Nebraska football hero with a promising life ahead of him. But when Billy’s coach encroaches on Roman’s relationship with his son, Roman fears he’ll lose Billy forever. Roman isn’t the only one whose world turns upside down. He’s one of five unsuspecting people whose lives intersect on a bright fall day.

If you would like to read the first chapter of John 3:16, go HERE

Do you like books? I sure do! I found the following list on Jendi’s site and thought it would be fun.

The Big Read is a USA National Endowment for the Arts program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six.

Here’s what we are supposed to do:

1. Look at the list and bold those we have read.
2. Italicize those we intend to read.
3. Underline (or colour) the books we LOVE .

Share this list in your blog, too, if you like.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

According to the Big Read site, the list came from “successful ‘city read’ programs across the country.” The original books focused on American literature, but as you can tell, it’s now expanded to pieces by Russian authors. I think there’s also cross-culture opportunities to read, discuss and study the book along with a community in Russia. Pretty cool, huh?

The average American has read 6 of the 100 books listed. I’ve read 43. I think that number has something to do with being an English minor in college and teaching high school literature classes. =)

I wish a few more American classics were on the list – specifically Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Twain’s (Clemens) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn/Tom Sawyer.

How many have you read?